It doesn’t add up

I have just read, in your newspaper, the most incredible

statement from a politician. Kate Forbes, Scotland’s Public Finance Minister, has stated that the SNP’S new income tax increases would raise £11.5 billion to help boost the economy and provide investment for public services.

There’s not a country in the world where I have seen it claimed that tax increases

would boost their economy – on the contrary, higher taxes stifle a country’s economy.

Where does Scotland get such economically illiterate politicians?

GM LINDSAY Whinfield Gardens, Kinross

The frequent calls for extra taxation, for example, to

reduce homelessness (21Feb) or to help the NHS, and assuming only benefits, ignore two problems.

First, hypothecated taxes, with the revenue benefiting a specific good cause, have never been allowed. Secondly, our economy is harmed by extra taxes, reducing people’s purchasing power.

Vast reductions in safely avoidable government expenditures would result from better “housekeeping”.

For example, the huge costs of decarbonisation in the entirely vain hope of influencing climate change could be trimmed by repealing the Climate Change Acts (2008, 2009). Any version of Brexit will curtail remits to the EU. Also, the EU’S £39 billion “divorce sweetener” must not be paid. Foreign aid, as a fixed percentage of our gross domestic product, and difficult to spend, demands better regulation.

Health, education, welfare and defence expenditures must be government’s real priorities.

Reducing present financial wastes is very much preferable to overspending and imposing extra taxes.

(DR) CHARLES WARDROP Viewlands Road West, Perth